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THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

May 31, 1999

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT MEMORIAL DAY SERVICE

Arlington National Cemetery

11:17 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, Secretary Cohen, for your
remarks, your devotion to your country and your outstanding leadership.
Secretary West, thank you for your work on behalf of our nation's veterans.
And to both of you, thank you for your support of the recent actions in
Congress to raise the pay of our military personnel, and to improve their
quality of life, to improve the retirement systems of the veterans and their
readiness. (Applause.)

General Ivany, thank you for your remarks, your example and
your leadership. Colonel Brogan, thank you for your prayers. Superintendent
Metzler, thank you for doing such a magnificent job of maintaining Arlington
National Cemetery, in honor of those who are buried here and as a tribute
to all America stands for. I thank the members of the Cabinet, the Joint
Chiefs, Congress, the Diplomatic Corps, the Armed Services who are here.
I welcome the veterans and the families of veterans and members of the Armed
Services, my fellow citizens.

I'd like to begin by asking that we all join in expressing
our thanks to the Air Force Band and the Singing Sergeants for doing such
a fine job here today -- they deserve it. Thank you. (Applause.)

Even though the day is bright and warm, I ask you to indulge
me, to spend a few extra moments to think about what it means that we here
today mark the final Memorial Day of this century. To be sure, it has been
a century that saw too many white stones added to these gentle hills, marking
America's sacrifices for freedom -- for over 100 years, in two world wars
and many other conflicts. Again and again, America has been tested in the
20th century, coming through it all, down to the present day, with even
greater blessings of liberty and prosperity, with our enduring optimism
and steady faith in our common humanity.

Thanks to our brave men and women in uniform, our nation
has never been more secure. Thanks to them, the Cold War is now another
chapter in the history books. Thanks to them, nations that fought two world
wars in Europe and in Asia, some of which had battled each other for centuries,
now cooperate with each other as never before.

On the eve of a new millennium we can see clearly how closely
the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform in the 20th century are linked
to the yearning for freedom that gave birth to our nation over 200 years
ago. A yearning based on the then radical premise that we are all inherently
equal, fully able to govern ourselves and endowed with a God-given right
to liberty. That is our history, a history that beckons us especially on
this Memorial Day and especially here at Arlington -- the most powerful
evidence we now have that our country has accepted consistently the old
adage that much is expected from those to whom much is given. From Concord
to Corregidor, from Korea to Khe Sanh, from Kuwait to Kosovo, our entire
history is written in this ground.

As Secretary Cohen said, only 11 days ago a young man from
Ohio, Chief Warrant Officer David Gibbs, was laid to rest here after his
helicopter crashed in a training exercise on May 5th in Albania. Chief Warrant
Officer Kevin Riechert died in the same crash. We honor these two brave
Americans who gave their lives in service to our nation's highest ideals,
joining other, more famous names who did the same. Here lie heroes of war,
like John Pershing, George Marshall, Omar Bradley, President Kennedy; the
great explorer, Robert Peary; brave astronauts who gave their lives to increase
our knowledge of the heavens; Medgar Evers, who fought for freedom at Normandy
on D-Day and then fought for freedom all over again at the University of
Mississippi; familiar names, like Joe Louis, Justice Earl Warren, Abner
Doubleday, Medal of Honor winner Audie Murphy -- all different, all American,
all made our presence possible.

We are the oldest constitutional democracy in the world,
but we must never forget in the context of human history just how quickly
we have come to where we are today. Secretary Cohen quoted another famous
American veteran who is buried here, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He fought
in the Civil War and went on to serve on the United States Supreme Court
until he was 93 years old. A young man caught him at the age of 90 reading
a copy of "Plato's Republic" and asked whatever in the world he was doing,
reading that weighty tome. And he said, I am doing this to improve my mind.

A remarkable man, Justice Holmes. His life shows us how quickly
we have come here. When he was a boy he shook hands with a veteran of the
American Revolution. As a young man, he fought in the Civil War, where he
was visited by President Lincoln. You may know the famous story that the
President was wearing his trademark stovepipe hat and he began, because
he was so tall, to attract fire from the Confederate forces, until Holmes
shouted -- without thinking -- these famous words, "Get down, you fool."
(laughter.) Lincoln replied, "I'm glad you know how to talk to a civilian."
(Laughter.)

Justice Holmes lived through World War I and the Depression.
He watched the United States assume the mantle of leadership. And he always
remembered what he had done as a young man -- that war reminds us that "our
comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things." He understood that
our freedom had been, and always would be, bought by men and women ready
to protect it, sometimes at great cost and peril.

So we did not become a great nation just because the land
was generous to those who settled it, though it was; just because the people
who came here worked hard and were clever and resourceful, though surely
our forbearers were. We became a great nation also because every time our
beliefs and ideals have been threatened, Americans have stepped forward
to defend them. From our biggest cities to our smallest towns, citizens
have done what had to be done to advance the dream that began on the 4th
of July in 1776. Always following Justice Holmes' famous admonition that
we must be involved in the action and passion of our time, for fear of being
judged not to have lived.

So my fellow Americans, if today is a day for history it
is also a day to honor those who lie here and in countless other places
all across the world in marked and unmarked graves; to honor them by looking
to the future; to rededicate ourselves to another hundred years of our liberty,
our prosperity, our optimism and our common humanity.

Today, there is a new challenge before us in Kosovo. It is
a very small province in a small country, but it is a big test of what we
believe in. Our commitment to leave to our children a world where people
are not uprooted and ravaged and slaughtered en masse because of their race,
their ethnicity or their religion; our fundamental interest in building
a lasting peace in an undivided and free Europe, a place which saw two world
wars when that dream failed in the 20th century; and our interest in preserving
our alliance for freedom and peace with our 18 NATO allies.

All of us have seen the hundreds of thousands of innocent
men and women and children driven from their homes, the thousands singled
out for death along the way. We have heard their stories of rape and oppression,
of robbery and looting and brutality. And we saw it all before, just a few
years ago, in Bosnia. For four long years, until NATO acted, combining with
the resistance of Bosnians and Croations, to bring the Dayton peace agreement
and to turn the tide of ethnic cleansing there.

How did this all happen? Well, 10 years ago the Berlin Wall
fell, ending communism's cruel and arbitrary division of Europe, unleashing
the energies of freedom-loving people there, after two world wars and the
Cold War, to be united in peace and freedom and prosperity. But that same
year in Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic became the last hold-out against a Europe
free, united and at peace, when he stripped away the rights of the Kosovars
to govern themselves. He then went to war against the Croations and the
Bosnians. And in the wake of that, after four years, a quarter of a million
people were dead, 2.5 million people were refugees -- many of them still
have not gone home.

There was a stunning record of destruction, told not only
in lives, but in religious, cultural, historical and personal buildings
and records destroyed in an attempt to erase the existence of a people on
their land.

In Kosovo we see some parallels to World War II, for the
government of Serbia, like that of Nazi Germany, rose to power in part by
getting people to look down on people of a given race and ethnicity, and
to believe they had no place in their country, and even no right to live.
But even more troubling, we see some parallels to the rumblings all around
the world where people continue to fall out with one another and think they
simply cannot share common ground and a common future with people who worship
God in a different way or have a slightly different heritage.

Think about the contrast of that to the military we celebrate
today. Every morning on Memorial Day, I have a breakfast for leaders of
the veterans community at the White House. And I stand there with eager
anticipation as people who have fought or whose relatives have fought --
and often died -- in our wars, come through the line. I noticed them today
-- there were Irish Americans and Italian Americans; there were Arab Americans
and Jewish Americans; there were Catholic Americans and Protestant Americans;
there were African Americans, there were Hispanic Americans, there were
Asian Americans.

Just look around here today at the kinds of people who are
wearing the evidence of their service to our country. We are a stronger
country because we respect our differences and we are united by our common
humanity. Now, we cannot expect everybody to follow our lead -- and we haven't
gotten it entirely right, now. We don't expect everybody to get along all
the time. But we can say "no" to ethnic cleansing. We can say "no" to mass
slaughter of people because of the way they worship God and because of who
their parents were. We can say "no" to that, and we should. (Applause.)

It is important that you know that in Kosovo the world has
said "no." It's not just the United States, or even just our 18 NATO allies
with us. People on every continent -- Arabs and Israelis are sending assistance,
Protestants and Catholics from Northern Ireland; Greece and Turks; Africans,
Asians, Latin Americans. Even those whose own lives have been battered by
hurricanes and other natural disasters and who have hardly anything to give
are sending help, because their hearts have been broken and their consciences
moved by the appalling abuses they have seen.

Our objectives in Kosovo are clear and consistent with both
the moral imperative of reversing ethnic cleansing and killing, and our
overwhelming national interest in a peaceful, undivided Europe which will
ensure we will not have to send large numbers of young Americans to die
there in the next century in a war. The objectives are that the Kosovars
will go home; the Serb forces will withdraw; an international force, with
NATO at its core, will deploy to protect all the people, including the Serb
minority, in Kosovo. And, afterward, to avoid future Bosnias and future
Kosovos, we will learn the lesson of the Marshall Plan and what we did for
eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell, by working with our European
allies to build democracy and prosperity and cooperation in southeastern
Europe so that there will be stronger forces pulling people together than
those that are driving them apart.

I know that many Americans believe that this is not our fight.
But remember why many of the people are laying in these graves out here
-- because of what happened in Europe and because of what was allowed to
go on too long before people intervened. What we are doing today will save
lives, including American lives, in the future. And it will give our children
a better, safer world to live in.

In this military campaign the United States has borne a large
share of the burden, as we must, because we have a greater capacity to bear
that burden. But all Americans should know that we have been strongly supported
by our European allies; that when the peacekeeping force goes in there,
the overwhelming majority of people will be European; and that when the
reconstruction begins, the overwhelming amount of investment will be European.
This is something we have done together.

And I ask you, in the days and nights ahead, to remember
our brave pilots and crews flying over Serbia, to keep their families in
our thoughts. I visited with them recently. I know that they risk their
lives every day and they even avoid firing back sometimes at people who
fire at them because they fire from heavily populated areas and they want
to avoid killing innocent civilians.

I ask you to support all possible efforts to relieve the
suffering of the people of Kosovo. Even those who escape will be struggling
with what happened to them for a long, long time. And this afternoon, I
ask all Americans to join with those who have urged us to engage in a moment
of remembrance at 3:00 p.m. EDT, in honor of those who have given their
lives for our country.

I also ask all Americans to honor, along with those who have
given their lives for our freedom, the living symbol of American valor --
our veterans and their families, the present members of Armed Services and
their families, wherever and however they serve.

How fitting it is that we are standing against ethnic cleansing
with our wonderful, myriad, rainbow, multi-ethnic military in our increasingly
diverse society that involves both the strength of our differences and the
even more powerful pull of our shared American values. Our military inspires
the world with their respect for one another and their ability to work together.
And you pass every test with the same flying colors -- red, white and blue.

Those who lie in this sacred place, and in all those other
places the world over -- many of whom will never even be known -- they would
be very proud of today's men and women in uniform. And in the bright new
century ahead, those who live free with pride in and without fear of their
heritage or their faith will be very grateful to today's men and women in
uniform.